Reading Response - Once More To The Lake

Throughout the first paragraph, he paints the past with broad strokes, and sets a scene in 1904 and putting forward a picture which we can use to reference back and share in his nostalgic moments. He then stretches out the timescale a little more in the next paragraph, discernible by the time he takes to relay other bits of information, filling out the summary a little more with the smell of lumber and emphasizing the serenity of the place with a reference to the nearby cathedral. From there, he wades heavily through scene after scene, and uses summary more sparingly for general observations about American life.

E.B.White weaves his observations throughout his narrative in such a manner that sometimes it's difficult to distinguish between the nostalgia he feels for his own experience and the nostalgia that he feels for American life altogether. He's very frank about tying these two things together. In fact, he spends an entire paragraph just on the American life celebration ("summertime, oh summertime..."). For my own taste, it was a little too prominent, but he does ease the reader into and out of the exuberance of the passage (in fact, the paragraph was about halfway through the piece).